In an ideal world, every piece of computer data would have synchronous copies made off-site to protect against a site disaster, periodic snapshot copies made to protect against data corruption, local nightly full copies to allow for rapid individual file or server restores, daily, weekly and nightly backups retained indefinitely to allow restoration of any file or the entire system back to any selected checkpoint, etc. Practically speaking, delivering the highest levels of data protection for all data is cost prohibitive, and would consume time, resources, network bandwidth and efforts beyond what is reasonable and available. As a result, Information Technology (IT) Administrators are forced to make decisions by considering cost and risk trade-offs. One best practice is for an IT Administrator to classify business data, and then apply the most cost effective data protection methodology for each class of data. For example, word processing documents might get a nightly backup, whereas order entry transactions might be synchronously replicated to a disaster recovery site. Today, levels of data protection tend to be managed via “islands of products”. For example, there is one product for basic backup and recovery, a different product for snapshots, a product for asynchronous replication, another product for synchronous replication, and so on.